Many Go problem books have grades on their covers. But these can mean anything from "These problems should be instantly familiar to players of Grade X" to "Players of Grade X should be able to solve these problems given an hour of concentration on each one". This page is an attempt to measure the books of Go problems currently available to the English speaking Go community (and perhaps others, too). Feel free to include any other titles, along with some indication of where they can be obtained from if they're not available from the usual suspects.

A well established part of professional go training is to work through books of easy problems as fast as you possibly can. Professional players are all able to solve very simple problems extremely fast, but it is hard to tell cause from effect. Can you really become stronger just by speeding up your atari spotting ability? Or is this just a side effect of learning to handle some of the harder concepts in the game? This page is concerned with collecting data towards answers to these questions.

To start with, it will simply be a table of the times. With luck there will soon be enough information to start including some graphical representations of the results.

What we are measuring is the time it takes you to work through the whole of the book in question. If you need to check the answers then try to subtract off the time you spent looking them up.

All contributions are welcome. Make sure you indicate:

Your playing strength at the time of doing the book, including the ranking system(s) used.

The time it took you to work through the book.

Roughly how many of the problems you got wrong.

If the book is one you have already worked through many times, please say so.

If you only worked through part of the book, say which part. Some of the harder ones may need to be divided up.

If you've attempted the collection multiple times, feel free to post all times; it is also useful to know how repeating a book changes your ability to do it.

Please be honest about your times, etc.: This page isn't a ranking of people, it's a ranking of books. If you don't want people to know who you are, make the entry anonymous.

Maeda/Slate & Shell 2001

(Matthew MacFadyen: This is of a similar level to volume 1 of the old Maeda series, but with rather more of the problems which are difficult first time round, but well known 'textbook' shapes if you read a lot.)